If Residential Segregation Persists, What Explains Widespread Increases in Residential Diversity?

Recent studies have identified increasing residential diversity as a near-universal trend across the United States. At the same time, a wide range of scholarship notes the persistence of White flight and other mechanisms that reproduce residential segregation. In this article, we attempt to reconcile these findings by arguing that current trends toward increased residential diversity may sometimes mask population changes that are more consistent with racial turnover and eventual resegregation. Specifically, we show that increases in diversity occur nearly identically across neighborhoods where White populations remain stable or decline in the face of non-White population growth. Our findings demonstrate that, particularly in its early stages, racial turnover decouples diversity and integration, leading to increases in diversity without corresponding increases in residential integration. These results suggest that in many neighborhoods, diversity increases may be transitory phenomena driven primarily by a neighborhood's location in the racial turnover process. In the future, stalled or decreasing levels of diversity may become more common in these areas as segregation persists and the process of racial turnover continues.

The persistence of white flight in middle-class suburbia.

Scholars have continued to debate the extent to which white flight remains racially motivated or, in contrast, the result of socioeconomic concerns that proxy locations of minority residence. Using 1990-2010 census data, this study contributes to this debate by re-examining white flight in a sample of both poor and middle-class suburban neighborhoods. Findings fail to provide evidence in support of the racial proxy hypothesis. To the contrary, for neighborhoods with a larger non-white presence, white flight is instead more likely in middle-class as opposed to poorer neighborhoods. These results not only confirm the continued salience of race for white flight, but also suggest that racial white flight may be motivated to an even greater extent in middle-class, suburban neighborhoods. Theoretically, these findings point to the decoupling of economic and racial residential integration, as white flight may persist for groups even despite higher levels of socioeconomic attainment.